The School for Scandal: serious malpractice uncovered at Plzeň Law Faculty

Plagiarism, students’ work going missing, fast-track degrees completed
within months, and dead professors still on the lecture roster – these
are a few of the allegations to have been brought against Plzeň Law
Faculty in recent weeks. What started as a media investigation into
plagiarism claims, levied against a number of senior professors at the
faculty, has turned into a much larger scandal which implicates some of
this country’s best-known politicians.

The story began with the start of the academic year at Plzeň’s Law
Faculty, when a student went to professor Petr Bezouška claiming he had
found passages in vice-dean Ivan Tomažič’s thesis which were copied
straight out of another legal text. What’s more, the student claimed that
the dean of the faculty, Jaroslav Zachariáš, was guilty of plagiarism as
well.

Mr Bezouška blew the whistle and then events took a rather strange turn.
Another vice-dean, Milan Kindl, entered into the fray, claiming that his
colleagues’ work was indeed fraudulent, but that it had been planted in
the library deliberately to root out an informer who had been leaking
information about the faculty to the press. Mr Kindl subsequently accused
Mr Bezouška of being a snitch.

As an excuse for why senior faculty members had been plagiarizing,
however, this failed to wash, and Mr Kindl, alongside Mr Zachariáš and Mr
Tomažič, resigned.

Photo: CTK
Then further irregularities started to come to light. Students were, it
was reported, gaining masters degrees at the faculty in a matter of months.
The daily Mladá fronta Dnes reported that one student completed a law
masters, which would normally take around five years, in two months over
the faculty’s summer holidays. Plzeň university authorities have said
that they are investigating around 400 former students, but that they
believe only 37 cases to be particularly suspicious.

What doesn’t help is that, in many of these most suspicious cases, the
Law Faculty has lost its copies of students’ final dissertations, as have
the students themselves. Amongst those implicated is controversial mayor of
Chomutov Ivana Řápková, who has said she can’t remember her teachers’
names, and the headline-grabbing mayor of Prague 5 Milan Jančík. Former
Plzeň student and shamed ex-PM Stanislav Gross has also been caught up in
the scandal.

Ivana Řápková, photo: CTK
The Czech Education Ministry is wondering whether to file a legal
complaint against the faculty and have the police investigate what actually
happened. A spokesperson said on Wednesday that the Education Ministry was
considering, among other options, revoking the Law Faculty’s right to
hand out degrees.